Katelyn

How to Send Medieval Correspondences the 21st Century Way

As many of you already know, snail mail is my favorite hobby. Recently, the price of stamps have gone up yet again in the United States, so the topic was on my mind. How was mail sent in the medieval ages?

What I found out is that many towns and villages didn’t really need to send mail. If they needed a message sent, they were either close enough to just send word themselves, or send someone else to orally give the message. Most common folk were illiterate, so letters were mostly among nobility. Many women of any class were also illiterate, so scribes were necessary for letter writing assuming one could afford it.

I’m determined to incorporate some mail into this month’s theme even if it would have been impractical during the time period. I documented the process as well for a fun, short post! You can be the judge of how historically accurate I was ;).

First, I didn’t want to flex my wealth by sending my bleached parchment, so I steeped some tea leaves and poured it over the parchment. I was going for a nice light brown, but I don’t think I left it to stain long enough.

I also thought the leaf bits would leave a speckled pattern, but it did not. You may be more successful in your own attempts.

Next, if you are a fair lady, send your husband or father to employ a scribe to put your message on paper. Luckily, I have one close by. Scribe Tori’s ink flows with a grace that no paw can mimic.

During the Middle Ages, one had to blindly trust that the message was accurate to what your oral account was. If your recipient couldn’t read, you also had to trust that the person reading the letter was not manipulating the message.

Good thing Tori has a great reputation in the village, I had a lot to say and I trust that she got the important parts on parchment.

The last step is to seal the letter. A wax seal worked just as efficiently as a return address, as high noble families had their own seal designs. I am no royal, so I opted for a simple one.

I attempted to persuade Tori to also act as courier, but she was busy.

And so I hopped onto my mighty steed and clip-clopped to find a travelling merchant to pay to send my message.

From all that I have read, sending written words during the Medieval Ages was more effort than it was worth for the average person. Letters were more important to large scale merchants.

Still, it was fun to do this simple craft that has a medieval fantasy flair without the struggles of the time period. This very important letter traveled by Mustang two minutes down the road to my boyfriend’s. I’m thinking I should have just sent my scribe to deliver the message by word instead of writing, but alas…

17 comments

  1. So fun! It seems like the tea should have speckled the paper. Those people lived a very different and difficult life compared to today. I like the unique look of your dash panel. Have a great weekend, Katelyn. 😊😎

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  2. That is so cool! Here in India in the 90s and early 2000s the literacy rate was low in rural areas amongst the older folks so the postmen read them letters from their children. These days they just receive calls on their cell phones.

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  5. You have the cutest scribe! How fun and creative, too. My grandmother Ruth and I used to send letters in the mail to one another. Then we would get on the phone and talk about whatever the subject was at the time. Looking back on it makes me laugh.

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  6. Very nice! I love handwritten letters. I’ve saved pretty much every handwritten letter I’ve ever gotten. The majority of them are from my grandma, who passed in 2021 at age 100 after never having owned a computer or cell phone. I recently sent something to an Internet friend who finally trusted me with her address after two years, I put a letter in the box, and she wrote me back, so I’ll be writing her back this weekend. My last attempt to have a pen pal (a real life friend who lived a few hours away at the time) fizzled after she got busy with having a baby and other big stuff going on in her life.

    Before DLTDGB, I wrote a short novel about a pen pal friendship, called Writing To Hilary. The chapters alternate between the character as a university student with a pen pal in another state, and the same guy in early middle age cleaning out his garage, finding her letters, and trying to track her down, with a lot of parallels to some other things going on in his life. The most recent rewrite isn’t really incomplete, although I always felt like it was missing something, but I put it on hold indefinitely because I started working on DLTDGB, and it seemed too repetitive. Most of the main characters in that novel are clearly based on the same real life people as character-Greg’s friends in the early years of DLTDGB, and some of the side plots in WTH are pretty much the same stories from my own past that I wrote about in DLTDGB. However, I did not include a pen pal in DLTDGB or a character based on the same person as Hilary herself, so that it would be theoretically possible to rewrite WTH in a way to duplicate less of DLTDGB.

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    • How fun is that! I also have so many saved letters from my best friend, all the way back to when we would pass notes in class before she moved away and became real pen pals. I hope you and your internet friend are able to keep with the mail correspondence, the hardest part is setting aside the time. I tend to write pages and pages lol. Your short novel sounds really cool, hopefully one day you will return to it!

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      • Thank you! If you ever run out of things to read, I can send it to you in its current readable form. What I really should do is make the character a little less like me and try writing a character that isn’t me, but since the story is so personal to me, it would be hard to do that, which is why I kind of abandoned it. Most of what I write features characters who are like me, because much of my writing is based on real life.

        Yes, setting aside time to write by hand is surprisingly difficult. I remember, for example, in the case of the pen pal who inspired Writing To Hilary, sitting in my dorm room writing to her with the window open looking at the big leafy tree outside and the world beyond. (That building has since been torn down, but the tree is still there.) That just seems like such a peaceful and happy experience… surprisingly hard to recreate in my life today, but I’ll work on that next time it’s my turn to write a letter.

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